Monday 31 January 2011

Caryl Churchill's 'Seven Jewish Children'

Towards the end of The Finkler Question, Hephzibah, Treslove and Finkler go to see a play called Sons of Abraham, 'a piece of agitprop, that people were writing angry or enthusiastic letters to the papers about' [249]. You remember it:
The final scene was a well-staged tableau of destruction, all smoke and rattling metal sheets, and Wagnerian music, to which the Chosen People danced like slow-motion devils, baying and halooing, bathing their hands and feet in the blood that oozed like ketchup from the corpses of their victims, a fair number of whom were children. [250]
This is Jacobson's fictional version of a very famous contemporary play by Caryl Churchill called Seven Jewish Children (2009). Follow that link to a Wikipedia entry on the play; read the sections on 'praise' and 'criticism'.

Jacobson has been one of the play's most outspoken critics. Here, for instance, is an article he wrote for the Independent [18 Feb 2009] denouncing it.

And here is (prominent Jewish academic and thinker) Jacqueline Rose's angry response to Jacobson in the Guardian.

Jacobson wasn't pleased by Rose's column. Nor is Rose pleased by his reply.

How much of this material makes it into the novel, do you think? And to what extent is it modified or fictionalised?

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